In U.s., Fewer Hear Call To Religious Life

September 14, 1997|By Steve Kloehn, Tribune Religion Writer.

Though saints and saints-in-waiting defy easy comparisons, one can't help but hear echoes of Mother Frances Cabrini, the turn-of-the-century saint of Chicago's gutters, in the eulogies for Mother Teresa.

It's particularly poignant for American nuns, whose collective role and even survival are in doubt.

It was just a generation ago that nuns proudly made up the institutional spine of the Roman Catholic Church in America. It was just a century ago that spiritual giants like St. Frances Cabrini led the sisters.

Like Teresa, Mother Cabrini was a small woman of frail health, who left her homeland to serve the poorest of the poor. Like Teresa, Mother Cabrini started from scratch to create an international congregation of religious women.

Like Teresa, Mother Cabrini had a steely, savvy edge that cut down any obstacles that did not yield to her fabled gentle touch.

"She would routinely go into a grocery store, fill a cart full of food, wheel it by the stammering checkout clerk and say, `Thank you for your donation,' " recalled Patricia Wittberg, a Sister of Charity who heard the tale when she was a novitiate from elderly nuns who had known Cabrini personally. The nuns, like most of the country, adored Cabrini.

Mother Cabrini died 80 years ago. Today the mourning for her counterpart from Calcutta presents a perplexing moment for American nuns.

Even as the secular world showers their calling with praise, they know that the likelihood of a new Mother Teresa or Mother Cabrini or Mother Seton appearing here, now or any time soon, can be measured only by faith. For better or worse--and there are arguments on both sides--the traditional Roman Catholic nun in America is vanishing fast.

From a high of 180,000 a generation ago, the number of nuns in the U.S. has dropped to about 90,000. More telling still, the median age of those who remain is nearing 70. A 1994 Los Angeles Times survey found that just 3 percent of all nuns were 40 or younger.

Mother Teresa has inspired 4,000 women around the world to repeat her vows as sisters in the Missionaries of Charity, and her death has deeply touched millions more. But church-watchers do not expect that wave of feeling to bring new recruits flocking to the dwindling congregations of nuns in America and much of the West.

"I think, unfortunately, that her version of religious life, which is exquisitely adapted to South Asia, is so obviously different from what nuns do here that I doubt that sisters here will get any bounce from it," said Wittberg, who herself is an example of the changing role of nuns--she is a professor of sociology at Indiana University and author of "The Rise and Fall of Catholic Religious Orders: A Social Movement Perspective."

In the Third World, scholars point out, women's orders continue to flourish, doing the same work that Mother Teresa did and that tens of thousands of American women used to do.

But in the developed nations of the West, where the Roman Catholic Church has struggled like no other over the role of women, the free fall of its primary female office is a puzzle that can be approached from many directions.

Some within the church see in the declining numbers a mirror of broader dissatisfaction among Catholic women, who cannot be part of the hierarchy of bishops and priests. Nuns, cited by liberal critics as the most visible symbol of women's secondary status in the eyes of that hierarchy, may be only the tip of the iceberg.

"The church is losing women. This is not a good sign," Wittberg said. "The church is alienating them."

Conservative defenders of the church would argue that it is not the church pushing them away so much as secular society pulling them away.

Looking from the outside, Hunter College history professor Jo Ann McNamara sees the dropoff simply as a sign that women no longer need to become nuns to create a career outside family duties or to make their mark on the broader world or simply to serve.

"I'm inclined to think that in the West, to a very large extent, their work is done--at least their work for women," said McNamara, whose book "Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns Through Two Millennia" argues that nuns played a key role in creating greater secular opportunities for women.

"Now if an American woman wants to perform acts of charity, she doesn't need to be a nun to do it," McNamara said. "If she wants to be a nurse or teacher, she doesn't need to be a nun."

For Sister Mary Brian Costello, the first female superintendent of Catholic schools in Chicago and later a key aide to Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, the swift decline in the number of nuns does not portend a change in mission for women of faith, but a change in external circumstances.

"When I entered in the '40s, I certainly didn't ever think I would be chief of staff for a cardinal," Costello said. "That evolution will continue.

"It isn't the form that is the magic thing, it is the service we are able to give."